Fig.1 Initial Snow 140x73.5cm Oil on canvas 布面油画1979

图1 初雪

Fig.2 Green Rain 90.5x75cm Oil on canvas 布面油画1981

图2 绿雨

Fig.3 Artist’s Mother 130 x66cm Oil on canvas 布面油画1982

图3 画家的母亲

　　十年前，我曾撰写一篇关于王怀庆的短文，后来收入他2007年在上海美术馆展览的画册中。此时读来，仍觉不愧，因此文抓住了这位艺术家天赋与个性的些许精华，由此筹划王怀庆此次西雅图艺术博物馆展览的姚进莊(Josh Yiu)博士仍容我在此向不熟悉上海美术馆展览图册中文章的读者再做一次解读。

　　我以下文章是否已说尽全部?当然不!进莊深思熟虑且资材丰富的文章已充盈的向人们展现了王怀庆事业的画面，那么还有哪里需要我再说些什么吗?

　　我要指出王先生杰出的其中一点就是王怀庆绝对的正直。很多今日著名的前卫艺术家，在1980年代以来和1990年代初以强有力而独特的方式创制着抗争与反讽意味的作品，而今日在助手军团的帮助下，源源不断生产着大同小异的作品，发财致富，这一过程带给他们不良的名声和引人注目的财富。

　　王怀庆不与此为伍。如果他富有(我个人无从知晓)，他没有炫耀。他将身心完全投入到他的艺术中，此时此刻人们从对中国当代艺术景观的意识中清醒过来而认识到这里有一个主角，心志单纯，全然没被功名所迷，他的作品将经时而耐久。

　　以下是我十年前所写的文章。

　　[关于王怀庆的一些想法]

　　能够给王怀庆即将出版的新画册写上两句，令我荣幸而喜悦。16年前我们在北京第一次见面，其后怀庆曾致信给我，其中他谈到艺术家在看待自己作品的时候往往和评论家有着完全不同的方式。因此我希望如以下文字有我对他的任何误读误解，望他多多包涵。

　　我和我的太太[环]都还清晰地记得那时初次见面的情形。我们爬上他们位于积水潭边那有着外墙楼梯的房子去拜访怀庆和他的妻子庆慧......他们的小居室，同时也是他们的工作室,塞满了他们两人的作品。其中一件我们未曾得见，就是怀庆给他小女儿画的肖像(图1)，那时正被美协送去参加1982年的法国春季沙龙展而还未返还。

　　我们认识他的时候，怀庆是当时现当代油画团体之一，被称为“同代人画会”中的引领者。他的作品在那时就已突显了力度与成熟，画作多取材于妻子、女儿、朋友、邻居之肖像及周围的生活环境(图2-3)。这些作品自然而亲切，且充满了对色彩与构成有时可谓是大胆的强烈感受，见诸于他在1987年的画作《弹吉他的女子》。1980年怀庆的成名之作《伯乐》，此作显著超前于那个时代，其虽选材于传统，却对当今中国意味深长，而怀庆更从形式与结构上对画作赋予了新的意味，这代表着在中国现当代绘画中对形式主义开始重新探索的重要转折。甚至那一时期的习作，以对一近邻老妇人(其本人为艺术家)的写生为代表，其基于形式上的构图安排与画面空间充盈着由暗哑设色构成的微妙和谐感都已超越了常规写生。[注：为1982年作品 《画家的母亲》-图4]

　　怀庆的老师吴冠中曾教导人们不要惧怕抽象，因在我们所处的大自然中充满了抽象之美，而在我们为自己所建造的世界中则更是如此。此种影响当然为王怀庆的进一步艺术发展带来了灵感。吴冠中发现了江南水乡白墙灰瓦之美，王怀庆则带我们深入其中。

　　让我们在王怀庆灵感发现的一瞬伴随他做一次身临其境的探寻：空无主人的房子，却不知为何开着门。怀庆似与主人熟识，我们便随行而入，漫顾四周，穿过庭院，沿着幽暗的回廊，而凝神于并无一人的空房。寂静无声，不见人迹。顺着怀庆的目光，我们注视着那色调微妙灰灰白白的墙皮，而映入眼帘的深色木质立柱与横梁在朴素白墙的托衬下形成了如此强烈的对比，简直就是一幅抽象的构成，静溢而不朽。

　　如果对的话，我只是意想，正是基于这样的经历，怀庆在90年代初开创了他非同凡响的与中国建筑相关联的系列力作---将精纯的中国艺术视觉境界与抽象的构成情愫相结合而与西方视野相接轨。王怀庆的艺术风格始终坚持根深于中华文化，更为重要的是他处于中国现当代历史转型时期而对自身文化的自省。在与我近来的通信中，他如此写道，“我非常看不起‘外国设计’、‘中国制造’的某些失掉了自己精神的作品。”同时指出，“他凭借一个中国知识分子‘醒过来’后痛苦的敏感，以及思想冲破禁锢时的锋利，连同多年来对艺术一颗不死的心，完成了一批批作品。”是三个因素激励了他：他对传统中国及其与现当代世界关系的感悟;他自身的生命记忆;以及他对绘画本质秩序的探讨。

　　一切看来顺其自然，怀庆在探寻房屋之后理应将注意力转入其内---当然并非沙发、软椅一类(若是那样当不可思议)，而是那些一丝不苟、无过分装饰的传统桌、椅以及日常用具。怀庆觉得这其间传达了中国人最根本的智慧。在这里，透过他奇妙的双眼，映出的是传统家具的简洁洗练，结构张力，以及一幅幅在朴素白墙衬托下所构成的雅致图像。

　　有关怀庆对结构感受的文字已有很多，或许已太多?我在此再次猜测，是否他觉得人们认为他已完全被结构所迷，而顺理成章的在90年代进入了“解构”，开始去拆散那些桌椅的呢?并不尽然，这里面有着一个内在的逻辑，一种根本的“正确性”。我们满怀兴致的看着他在我们眼前将一桌一椅拆成散件，再将这些零件悬浮散漫的“放飞”出去，如宇宙中炸开的卫星碎片般飘过画面而越入深远的空间。这些画作引起的共鸣，以《寻找》一画为例，是彻底的自由与释放。

　　怀庆是否对在这条脉络上的探索感到疲倦呢?当然不是。因以我们的视觉经验所及万物，可被如此处理的实为无限。但以避免我们就此认为他的作品就如这般的完全现代与“非历史性”，怀庆创作了他对《韩熙载夜宴图》才华横溢的“解构”。做为北京1996年中国油画学会首展的重要作品，此作的精致奥妙以及视觉效果的魅力均可与毕加索的创作相媲美。

　　尽管怀庆开拓的这种将日常家具、用具“重整一新”的思路已具有广阔无限的可能，而基于艺术本身的信仰，怀庆继续前行。在他1999年澳门名为[从画-剪-再画]的个展中创作了崭新而不同以往的作品。在这些作品中，利用剪影方式获得的图形虽与他在《夜宴图-1》中所展现的具有同样的形式趣味，但或许正因《夜宴图-1》一作从形式至思维的深邃精妙都已达如此超凡之境，遂令怀庆感到需重返起点再次开始。怀庆自认为这些带有试验性的“剪纸”作品，生动且率真，但并非成熟之作。当然这些与他那些深思熟虑、视觉效果曼妙且诗意盎然的房屋系列，和他那“解构”桌椅一类的作品相比而言，显得微不足道。但我们并不急于下定论。怀庆相信这其中的潜力，它们赋予他的想象力，在形与色间蕴含的情愫表现力，我们只当满怀信心与冀望的放眼未来以观怀庆将从中获得怎样的成果。

　　自我十年前写下这些文字后，王怀庆实实在在的继续前行，没有停留，持续的发展与新生使他的作品更为丰富，更具创意，更成熟，而在此展中将一一呈现。

　　迈珂•苏立撰写

　　Michael Sullivan

　　2010年5月 牛津

　　Preface

　　Ten years ago, I wrote a short essay about Wang Huaiqing, which was later published in the catalogue for his important exhibition of 2007 in the Shanghai Art Museum. Reading it again, I am not ashamed of it, for I feel that it catches something of the essence of that artist’s talent and character. So Josh Yiu, who has mounted this fine exhibition in the Seattle Art Museum, is kindly allowing me to reproduce it for readers unfamiliar with the Shanghai catalogue.

　　Does it say it all? Surely not! Josh’s deeply thoughtful and informative essay fills out the picture of his career, so what is there left for me to say?

　　One thing that stands out is Wang Huaiqing’s absolute integrity. Today famous avant-garde artists, who in the late 1980s and early 1990s were producing work—partly in protest, partly in satire—of great power and originality, are today, with the help of an army of assistants, making fortunes turning out endless variations of the works that had brought them notoriety, and have become conspicuously wealthy in the process.

　　Wang Huaiqing does not belong in their company. If he is wealthy (and I have no way of knowing weather he is or not), he shows no sign of it. He is totally dedicated to his art, and now that people are waking up to the shallowness of so much of the contemporary Chinese art scene, they recognize that here is a major figure, single-minded, and totally uncorrupted by success, whose work will endure.

　　This is what I wrote ten years ago.

　　Some Thoughts about Wang Huaiqing

　　It is both an honour and a pleasure for me to write a few words to accompany Wang Huaiqing’s new catalogue. Sixteen years ago, after our first meeting in Beijing, he remarked in a letter to me that the way the artist looked at his or her work was quite different from that of the critic. So I hope he will forgive me if, in what follows, I have in any way misunderstood him.

　　My wife Khoan and I well remember that first meeting, when we climbed the outside staircase of their house beside the lake to visit him and Qinghui. Their tiny flat, which was also their studio, was crammed with pictures by them both. One that was missing was Huaiqing’s portrait of their little daughter Wang Tiantian(fig. 1), which the Chinese Artists Association had sent to the Paris Salon in 1982 and had not yet been returned to him.

　　By the time we met him, Huaiqing was a leader among the group of modern oil painters who called themselves The Contemporaries, Tongdairen. His work was already remarkably strong and mature. The subject matter of his paintings was chiefly portraits of his wife and daughter, friends and neighbours, and his surroundings(fig. 2-3). They are natural and intimate, yet infused with a strong—sometimes daring—feeling for colour and design, notably in his Woman with a Guitar of 1987. In his famous Bole—Judge of Horses he chose a traditional subject—albeit one with profound meaning for today’s China—infusing it with a sense of form and structure that represents a turning-point in the rediscovery of Formalism in modern Chinese painting. Even an intimate study of the old lady who lived nearby, herself a painter(fig. 4), is lifted above convention by the formal arrangement and the subtle harmony of muted colour that fills the picture space.

　　Huaiqing’s mentor, Wu Guanzhong, had taught people not to be afraid of Abstraction, for abstract beauty is all around us in nature, and indeed in the world that we have created for ourselves. Surely it was his influence that inspired Wang Huaiqing to take the next step in his artistic development. Wu Guanzhong had discovered the beauty of the white-walled and grey-tiled houses of the Jiangnan region. Wang Huaiqing takes us inside.

　　Let us accompany him vicariously on one of his moments of discovery. The occupants of the house are out, and have unaccountably left the gate open. Huaiqing evidently knows them, for we go in together and wander around, through the courtyard, down dark passages, peering into empty rooms. The house is quiet and still, for there is no one about. Through Huaiqing’s eyes we contemplate the plaster walls in subtle tones of grey and off-white; we note how the dark wood of posts and beams forms a striking contrast with the plain walls, creating an almost abstract design that is both calm and monumental.

　　It was from this kind of experience, if I am right—and I am only imagining it—that Huaiqing in the early 1990s created his superb series of paintings of interiors that combine a purely Chinese visual world with a feeling for abstract design. They must surely owe something, however indirectly, to modern Western artists as different as Mondrian and Franz Kline, and are all the richer for that.

　　It seems natural that Huaiqing, after exploring the house, should turn his attention to the things in it—not sofas and padded chairs (for that would be unthinkable!) but the austere, unadorned traditional tables, chairs and stools of everyday use. Here that wonderful eye of his reveals their simplicity, the tensile strength of their structure, the elegant patterns these objects made against the plain surface of the walls.

　　Much has been written about Huaiqing’s feeling for structure. Too much perhaps? Was it—and here again I am guessing—his feeling that people thought he was obsessed by structure that led him in the 1990s, quite literally, to “deconstruct” the tables and chairs by taking them apart?

　　But there is an inner logic, an essential “rightness” in this. We watch with wonder as he dissects a table or chair into pieces before our eyes, and sets the separate members floating free to drift like fragments of an exploded satellite across the picture surface, and off beyond it into space. The resonances of these pictures—of seeking, for example—are wholly delightful and liberating.

　　Does Huaiqing feel that he has exhausted this vein? Surely not. For the range of things in our visual experience that might be treated in this way is infinite. But, lest we should think that his work in this manner has become completely modern and “unhistorical,” he has produced in his brilliant “deconstruction” of the Night Banquet of Han Xizai, centerpiece of the National Art Exhibition of 1996 in Beijing, a work more subtly sophisticated and visually enthralling than anything Picasso ever achieved.

　　Yet even with the vast possibilities that he has opened up for the refashioning of common things, and indeed of the artistic tradition itself, Huaiqing keeps moving on. In his Macau exhibition of 1999, which he called Painting, Cutting and Repositioning, he did something entirely new and different, although these silhouettes were infused with the same feeling for form and silhouette that he showed in his Night Banquet painting. Perhaps, having achieved a work of such extraordinary formal and intellectual sophistication, Huaiqing felt the need to go back to the beginning and start again. He himself thinks these experiments with cut-outs, lively and ingenious as they are, are immature. Certainly by comparison with the profound thought, visual sensibility and poetic feeling of his house interiors and his deconstructed tables and chairs, they are very slight. We must reserve judgement. He believes in their potential and, given his imagination and capacity for emotional expression through form and color, we can only look forward with hope and confidence to what he will eventually make of them.

　　Since I wrote those words, ten years ago, Wang Huaiqing has, indeed, left those cut-outs behind, and moved on, constantly renewing himself to achieve an ever richer, more inventive, and more mature body of work, which is well represented in this exhibition.

　　Michael Sullivan

　　Oxford, May, 2010